The Daughter of an Empress

Anna had succeeded, she was regent; she had shaken off the burden of

the Bironic tutelage, and her word was all-powerful throughout the

immeasurable provinces of the Russian empire. Was she now happy, this

proud and powerful Anna Leopoldowna? No one had ever yet been happy

and free from care upon this Russian throne, and how, then, could Anna

Leopoldowna be so? She had read the books of Russian political history,

and that history was written with blood! Anna was a woman, and she

trembled when thinking of the poison, the dagger, the throttling hands,

and flaying sword, which had constantly beset the throne of Russian, and

in a manner had been the means in the hands of Providence of clearing

it from one tyrant, only, indeed, to make room for another. Anna, as we

have said, trembled before this means of Providence; and when her

eyes fell upon Munnich--upon his dark, angry brow and his secretly

threatening glance--she then with inward terror asked herself: "May not

Providence have chosen him for my murderer? Will he not overthrow me, as

he overthrew his former master and friend Duke Biron?"

Anna now feared him whom she had chiefly to thank for her greatness. At

the time when he had made her regent he had satisfactorily shown that

his arm was sufficiently powerful to displace one regent and hurl him to

the dust! What he had once done, might not he now be able to accomplish

again?

She surrounded this feared field-marshal with spies and listeners;

she caused all his actions to be watched, every one of his words to be

repeated to her, in order to ascertain whether it had not some concealed

sense, some threatening secret; she doubled the guards of her palace,

and, always trembling with fear, she no longer dared to occupy any one

of her apartments continuously. Nomadically wandered they about in their

own palace, this Regent Anna Leopoldowna and her husband Prince Ulrich

of Brunswick; remembering the sleeping-chamber of Biron, she dared not

select any one distinct apartment for constant occupation; every evening

found her in a new room, every night she reposed in a different bed, and

even her most trusted servant often knew not in which wing of the castle

the princely pair were to pass the night.

She, before whom these millions of Russian subjects humbled themselves

in the dust, trembled every night in her bed at the slightest rustling,

at the whisperings of the wind, at every breath of air that beat her

closed and bolted doors.

She might, it is true, have released herself from these torments with

the utterance of only one word of command; it required only a wave of

her hand to send this haughty and dangerous Munnich to Siberia! Nor

was an excuse for such a proceeding wanting. Count Munnich's pride and

presumption daily gave occasion for anger; he daily gave offence by

his reckless disregard and disrespect for his chief, the generalissimo,

Prince Ulrich; daily was it necessary to correct him and to confine him

within his own proper official boundaries.